After a little talk with Reliance, it was time to explore the final area. We’d deliberately delayed searching the hangars containing the Jackals. Partially because there were probably enough old munitions in there to possibly melt the ship into slag. Partially because bringing even one single ship back into order would cost a fortune, and take way more time than we had before our next repayment was due, and a little bit because of my weakness, when I see a poor baby in that state I wanna fix ‘er up, and since I couldn’t afford to fix one, let alone the god knows how many were down here. Well, this was going to be depressing as hell for me.

But we couldn’t stall any longer, if there was going to be anything go catastrophically wrong around here it would start in the hangar, and probably end in a BOOM. Until now, we hadn’t had access, so we’d taken a “we can’t see you, you can’t blow us to smithereens” stance. Given that we weren’t currently incinerated into dust, I’d say that for the past few months it had worked just fine. But we had no desire to press our luck on that front.

The hangar opened with a screech like the souls of the damned, I made a note to add oil the damn door to my to-do list. I planned to spend a lot of time down here, and my augs made my hearing a little more sensitive than most, there was no way I was going through that hell every time I came down here.

Then, everything was forgotten, as my eyes beheld paradise, before me were row, upon row, of single seat Jackal gunships, in varying states of repair, disrepair, and general neglect. It broke my heart to see, all those poor babies.

“It’s OK now, momma’s here, don’t you fret none, we’ll have you up and flying soon.”

“Eileen NO.” Jenel lectured, "You can pick one, only one.”

“Per crew member?” I tried, hey sometimes you got to try right?

“No for the entire ship, we already have this entire thing to restore, since I can’t see you letting us sell her on for The Jackal’s sake, and we are, despite this nonsense, trying to dig our way out of debt, you can choose one Jackal, the rest are parts, or to sell on.”

“Negative” Reliance replied. Good ol’ Reliance, I knew she would have my back. “The captain has insufficient authority to oversee the sale of Flotilla weapons grade technology. Any attempt at a sale of such items will result in automated activation of the self-destruct sequences, under the technological armament's treaty.”

I suppose in this situation I was supposed to be alarmed, instead I looked at the rows of ships all begging for a fix-up and felt my heart skip a beat. If the threat of a ship wide detonation gave me an excuse to not sell them all on, I’d take it.

“Oh darn, then our debt remains.”

“Captain, may I suggest, if you are truly in a situation that would lead to a forced sale of this ship, and by extension a detonation to prevent our technology from falling into enemy hands. We could lay in a course for the boneyard.”

OK, that sounded relevant to my interests, the others however groaned.

“Reliance, I am going to give you some advice for free. Your new captain? She sees a shiny piece of technology, she has a tendency to adopt it. Are you really, really sure, that you want to unleash her on a Flotilla boneyard.”

“No I am absolutely not sure of that, however we do need a repair module, as mine was damaged, and without repairs I will explode, or worse, within a few months to a few years.”

“Worse? There are worse things than exploding?” Nara asked, more than a little shocked.

“Yes, there absolutely are, but my programming includes caring for the crew's mental well-being, a duty that going into further detail violates. So please do not ask.”

Nara wasn’t particularly happy with that answer, but got the feeling she would be less so from the gory details, so she didn’t say anything else. Smart kid.

“Um, perhaps we should finish our inspection here before we head to The Boneyard, if we’re going on a supply run then it’s best to have a proper shopping list right?”

“That’s surprisingly organised for you, Eileen, so what’s the angle.”

“I’m thinking she probably wants to score bits for all The Jackals too while she’s there, if this place hasn’t already been looted, I mean. It has been quite a long time, and after the collapse a lot of the old places were looted. So makes sense to know what we have planned, I guess.”

Jenel sighed. “You’re never going to let them go till you’ve tweaked them, are you?”

“Of course not.” I said, with my biggest shit eating grin. “Why would I do that?”

“Because o’ captain, we need to not go broke.”

“Then we’ll raid that Boneyard for bits, that place was Flotilla, it’s bound to have some good stuff we can use, right?”

“Only if we can convince you to part with any of it, I’m not completely sure that we can pull that off.”

“I’ll be good, girl scouts honour.”

“You were never a girl scout.”

“Yeah, I was, lasted about a week.”

“So I want to know what happened?”

“It’s hard for me to specify one particular issue, could have been the cans on the campfire incident, or maybe leaving Julie Meyers hanging halfway up a tree in her sleeping bag. Or maybe hitting on the leader's sister.”

Jenel just facepalmed, can’t say I blame her, I was a little tyke.

“Captain, we have incoming, several large frigates, they look to be over specified weight, and most of that is weaponry.”

“Oh CRAP, that must be Zane. Remember those proper authorities you talked about earlier? He’s made a fortune pretending to be one. Mostly in “protection fees. my guess is he just figured out you’re active, and decided it was time he claimed salvage rights.”